Resonant optical transmission through sub-wavelength annular apertures caused by a plasmonic transverse electromagnetic (TEM) mode

We demonstrate enhanced transmission through annular aperture arrays (AAA) by the excitation of the transverse electromagnetic (TEM) guided mode. A complete numerical study is performed to correctly design the structure before it is experimentally characterized. Actually, the challenge was to get efficient TEM-based transmission in the visible range. It turned out to be a hard task because of the strong absorption associated with this guided mode. Nevertheless, we have succeeded to experimentally prove its excitation thanks to the enhanced transmission measured in the far-field. This is the first time we demonstrate experimental evidence of this phenomenon with such AAA structure illuminated at oblique incidence in the visible range. This increases the potential applications of such structures as well, single molecule spectroscopy, photovoltaic, spectral filtering, optical trapping, etc... (paper)